Glucose is a main characteristic compound in life process. The detection and analysis of glucose have important significance to human health and diagnosis, treatment and control of diseases.
Currently, the detection methods for glucose mainly comprise chromatography, differential spectrophotometric method and colorimetric method. However, these existing detection methods have disadvantages of low sensitivity, labor-consuming and time-consuming. The electrochemical sensor has becomes a competitive method for glucose detection due to the advantages of high sensitivity, good selectivity, short response time, simple operation and low cost. According to whether to use the enzyme, the electrochemical glucose sensor could be divided into enzymatic and non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor. Enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor are highly selective and sensitive, but the disadvantages of low stability, poor detection reproducibility, low activity of immobilized enzyme and other problems caused by the property of the enzyme itself limit the application of enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor in the detection of glucose.
In preparation of non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor, the electrocatalytic activity of electrode material is of great importance for electrochemical oxidation of glucose. Studies found that some noble metal nanoparticles, which have high activity to catalytic oxidation of glucose, also have good biocompatibility. Therefore, noble metal nanoparticles can be used to prepare electrode material of non-enzymatic electrochemical glucose sensor. To improve the stability and utilization rate of metal nanoparticles, metal nanoparticles loaded on carriers are usually taken as composite electrode material. In the prior art, common carrier materials are inorganic material such as carbon nanotubes, graphene or carbon nanofibers. However, these materials are non-renewable and too costly. Nanocellulose is a reproducible biologic material, and are widely existed in nature. Nanocellulose has advantages of uniform morphology and size, controllable surface property, good biocompatibility, good biodegradability and low cost etc. The nanocellulose possess a good colloidal stability in water due to the electron-rich feature of their surface. The nanocellulose also tend to form an open porous network structures through inter-particle hydrogen bonds. These properties render nanocellulose suitable to serve as support material for metal nanoparticles. Currently, the application of nanocellulose supported metal nanoparticles in non-enzymatic glucose electrochemical sensing have not been reported so far.